Swen Vincke, founder of Larian Studios, recently spoke to IGN about how Baldur's Gate 3 is going in Early Access, and what the developer has learned about its players. "They're all horny, I can tell you that," he said.
While we know that the RPG's most-romanced NPC is a human wizard who looks like a commercial for men's grooming products, apparently players have also been going out of their way to get with one of the villains, a dark elf named Minthara. "I can see how many people slept with Minthara", Vincke said, kind of creepily. "That's quite large, and to get there you have to be evil. There's certainly people that have had no moral scruples."
Baldur's Gate 3 contains a thorough variety of ways to be evil, even if it's not just for the sake of getting laid. Apparently the studio's writers had to be pushed into adding some of them. "The writers have a tendency of being good and not putting in the evil options," Vincke said. "We had to actually force them to go through everything and put in more contrasting options so that they could put the evil ones in there." But it is in the tradition of the series to have options for every alignment, even if being evil in the first two games did kind of suck. "For choice to be there, you need to have the ability to do good and evil and things in between," Vincke explained, "and edge cases, and stuff like that."
Although players have been exploring the evil options, some have been put off by the nastiness of the companions who can be recruited in this Early Access version. They include two stubbornly inflexible characters who bicker a lot, and a straight-up vampire spawn. "There's been a group of people complaining about the fact that the companions are snarky and they have to have an opinion," Vincke said. "But we've only put the 'evil' and the 'neutral' ones out there. We haven't put any of the 'good' characters in yet, so I think that will balance that."
In spite of the many things about Baldur's Gate 3 that are different to the original games, those argumentative, sometimes evil companions do feel very true to the series that had us meet and potentially recruit the unequivocally evil Xzar and Montaron almost immediately after the tutorial.
While adding more good-aligned companions, as Larian plans to do, will please players who don't want to roam around with a party of edgelords, some players have complaints too fundamental to address. Those who want real-time combat for instance. "The game will be moddable eventually," Vincke points out, "so people will be able to make their mods. I expect multiple flavors of Baldur's Gate 3 to come out of that. Over time there will be probably a flavor that will appeal hopefully to everybody."
Our Dave James had to uninstall the Early Access Baldur's Gate 3 to avoid ruining it for himself, but your mileage may vary.
